The Joy of Giving Up with Bob Morris, Best-Selling Author and Columnist

Hi there, I'm Diane Grissell. I'm also known as Silver Despedians to a lot of you. This is the Silver Despedians Perception Dynamics podcast. And today we are recording in iconic Manhattan Center. So this is a real honor to be here. I have a great guest today and you have probably read at least one thing he's written, if not many or any of his regular columns that have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Town and Country or any of his books, of which there are several.

What I really like about my guest, who is Bob Morris, the Bob Morris if you're looking first website is that he really tackles and drills down on family relationships and dynamics in such a thought provoking way. I can't wait to just have a free form discussion with him for the next bit. So TuneIn and get comfortable. This is going to be really good unless you're on a treadmill walk and enjoy it and enjoy this episode. Bob, Thank you. Thank.

You, Diane. Bob, you really drill down on people, dynamics, humans, human interaction in such a way that's so fascinating to me and self reflective. Where does this come from in you? Self reflective and also self deprecating. Yes, you know, writers who do well, especially in the

nonfiction realm, which is what I've done memoirs and I had a first person column in the Times. The main thing is honesty. People know it when they see it, and often honesty means embarrassing revelations about yourself. You know, one of the columns I

read that you wrote, which I wanted to share with everyone in the world when I read it, was about getting pulled over for drunk driving and how you started it. You know your belligerence, your anger, your. Yeah, how dare they. I was barely over the drinking limit. Yes. And it was it, you know, and you got to that self reflective point in it. Yes, yeah.

And that it's unfortunate that people who Google me or look at the Bob Morris will see that I was in jail for drunk driving in San Diego. Well, you know, I think plenty of us could have been, you know, but we didn't get caught. And you know, but you reflected on it in such. A. An eye opening way. Yeah. And if there are writers out there, there's a lesson in all of that, which is there's a little arc to that. You know, it was in the New York

Times op-ed pages. And you know, there's there's a story there of somebody pissed off. How did these cops find me? They didn't get me at my car. I probably would have had a case against them because they accosted me and handcuffed me after I'd left the car, which I don't think they could do. And I was like, how dare you, you know, and what are you wasting your time? And why is San Diego spending all this money?

You know, apparently there were helicopters following me for my 5 minute drive from the bar to my hotel and on very, you know, empty streets. So it for all these reasons I was like, Oh my God, this is a how dare they? You know, I didn't quite say, do you know who I am? But you know, when hours later, after finally getting thrown in a cell, it started to fill up in the course of the night with all these men, the situation was terrible.

I remember being mad about that. Like, I didn't even know how to make a phone call because the instructions were unclear. The toilet was overflowing. It was COVID time, and people were not wearing masks properly. And I was still pissed off.

And then over the course of what, 16 hours being stuck with these guys, I started to realize none of them had the money for bail to get out. They, you know, they were call. I, you know, the phone is right there in the cell with you. And I heard them like they were calling their father and so ashamed or they were calling their ex-girlfriend and trying to work out, you know, and and also then you start to hear what they had done to get thrown in jail.

You know, one guy got thrown in jail because he was he fell asleep in the backyard of his former girlfriend who had a restraining order against them. But another one was driving the car where his friend got out of the car and robbed a bodega. You know, another one had drugs and it went for like 16 hours. They gave us a Bologna sandwich. I didn't know what was going to happen. You lose complete control of your authority, especially as a person that's always been able

to be in control. You know, in my socio economic bracket, you don't you're not face what like for example, immigrants are facing right now or even people depended on Medicaid or people dependent on other healthcare, women reproductive. So you know, I was just used to being privileged and I started to hear all these people's stories. And when finally I got my call through, I called a friend right down the road in San Diego and she bailed me out for 2500 bucks.

And the rest of the guys in my cell heard this. And I'll never forget, like several of them said, your friend bailed you out. Like they couldn't believe that there was a guy among them who had that, who had access to that money that I could pay her back for. And in the course of that and finally getting out, it was very sobering about the system and, and the fact that these this jail cell was so disgusting and these people are treated so

badly. And they have, you know, a lot of them didn't do terrible things. But it's always almost 24 hours overnight in jail with a bunch of other people in an overflowing toilet on top of it. Unless you have a question on top of it.

Then the system forced me into two courses, 2 online courses, which were set up like military martial law situations. You had to zoom at a certain time. If you were one minute late, you didn't get credit for attending and you had a $35 fee and you had to go on the phone for hours to rearrange another zoo meeting. And I remember I was late one day because it was the Jewish, it was Yom Kippur. And I had been to like, say that for my parents memorial, you know, and I was late and that I

was punished. You know, you could not. It was a very, very military situation run by a former addict, which, and this is apparently how these former addicts are, once they get sober, they get really tough with you. And I started to realize that she had tremendous trouble, this woman who I hated, you know, who was running this group for like God knows how many 20 weeks or something. It was horrible. If God forbid, my Wi-Fi was down, I'd miss a course.

It was so nerve wracking. And I started to realize she was having really big problems with her teenager, and I think her dog had died. And I realized that there was, in all her toughness, a true love of helping and trying to get people to really give up drinking or to really not drink and drive again. Now a lot of these people, in a similar way to the people in jail, were having to take the bus to work because their their licenses had been revoked.

They had to stop work to attend this meeting, like in some closet in their place of employment at time it was. It was incredibly it was much harder on them than on me.

Now I'm curious, you, you talked about the loss of control. How do you parallel the loss of control that you experience with that, with your career? You know, yes, as a writer. Yes, well, that's a hefty transition. We like to get right into the meat of it here, Bob. Well, ultimately with this driving thing, I came to realize that I couldn't have control of the situation and in my opinion

didn't matter. I think that in a writing career, you also, there are certain things that writers can't control, and one of them is the culture and what it's hungry for, what it wants, what will be received when you publish a book. But if you go back from that, you also then have to wonder what a publisher is looking for. And I think we're all aware of the shift in interest in various

ways. Probably there's a certain interest right now in the topic of data and probably tyranny, you know, based on the situation we're in right now with the government or I, you know, obviously the culture of around DEI is up for a lot of conversation. A lot of black authors are doing really interesting things that I've been done before and publishers want them.

OK, what they might not be looking for, unless you're brilliant and David Sedaris or Sebastian younger or, you know, in a pop level, James Patterson, what they're probably not going to look for right now is a older white man. I just agree with you, you know, I unless you're brilliant, I. I, I'm going to tell you why I disagree with you because I, I have to, I have to put a time out on that one, not not time out with the cameras. Why I, I think, I think society

is always shifting. I think the extremes in life and form the middle. So you know, there's always these extremes, but the pendulum always comes back into this middle area. And like 2 of like one of your books was assisted loving and, and these are some, you know, 2 year older books, but they really spoke to me. And the other one was last words with your parents.

And they probably really hit me because my mother was remarried twice after her 50 year marriage with my father and her her second husband died within three months after their honeymoon. And it would devastated her, devastated her. She was the only person my mother was ever with besides my father. And then she met someone else on Valentine's Day. They dated for a year and they got married and were married for 14 years before she died.

But the last two years, three years before she died, had a lot of very intense conversations with her, more than I had ever had during my life. And when I was reading these books, and I think about these books, and I think we have an aging population. Now, I know sometimes you don't want to rewrite what you've written, but you had such insights. And we have an aging population. We're getting older. We have parents getting older.

And I think about the legacy lessons that you draw upon and do it so well. I'd want to know more about what you can pull out of anyone. Well listen at the risk of undermining your lovely response. Don't you dare. But I'm, you know, I'm going to just because I wanted, I like, I like the opportunity to be honest about things. Yeah.

So that first book, which was about my, it's called assisted loving True Tales of Double Dating with my dad is a good premise. It's, you know, basically my dad was also married 50 years. He wanted to be in love. He turns to me, maybe because I know how to dress, you know, maybe because I was the single gay son, not the other son who was married with two children running a big business.

He, he, he knew I was not readily available, but that he could, he could nudge me into getting involved, let's put it that way. And he wanted help on dating. So, I mean, originally I called that book Pimping for my Dad because I was like trying to find women for him partly, and this is the unacceptable part of it, I didn't want him with just anybody. I wanted somebody acceptable to my taste level. Right, I think. And he was a sweet guy who was not a snob.

He was an educated man, a lawyer and a judge. But he was a slob. He was terrible table matters, but a wonderful guy. But he could have dragged anything into our family. He could have, you know, he wasn't so picky. So I became the Screener. I even tried to procure women for him if I heard somebody had a single mom from a nice family. We all kind of like a little dating help, you know, that person who knows us well enough that's going to go out and find that mate, of course.

It's easier. Simultaneously, I was going to say I was single myself and sort of almost resigned. I was cynical. It wasn't the time of of apps yet, but it was a little bit of that in the culture. It's just I had talked myself into realizing that a life alone was not a crime and doable with lots of friends and lots of a big career. And but in the course of seeing how much he wanted love and how he threw himself into it, I fell in love myself. So it's sort of a double.

There's a whole, it's a double love story. And, you know, I ended up marrying and he ended up with somebody. And of course, it was very attractive to all the networks. All wanted meetings. And you know, Oh my God, it's like all kinds of people, major people made adaptations that for pilots and it never got made. When the book came out, I was on fresh air for an hour twice with Terry Gross on the radio. It got all kinds of great

reviews and everything. And this is back to your topic of control, Diane. It didn't sell this book that a lot of people still remember and had. I was so lucky to have all the attention, all the media, all the interest from Hollywood. It didn't go anywhere and the book did not earn back my advance. I think it needs a relaunch. And, you know, it was very, I suffered at that, you know, and you keep trying. And I thought to myself, well, it just didn't catch the wind.

It didn't catch the wind that would sail it into financial success. Now you can say what you want about that, but as I'm older now, I think I understand it better. I'll tell you another story about control. Around the same time I wrote that book, I was asked to ghostwrite the book for this beautiful actress, Diahann Carroll, who was the first black actress to have a sitcom on NBC. She was a Broadway * Richard Rodgers wrote a musical for her called No Strings.

She was the black woman on Dynasty, the black bitch, Dominique Deveraux on Dynasty. She was a star and and and revered. You know, her friends were people like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and Miles Davis and and she lived a superstar life and was beautiful. When I was working on this book with her, it came out it won the NAACP Image Award. It hit the bestseller list for a week or two. It didn't do gangbusters.

And when it came time for a year later to come out in paperback, we were doing an interview for TV or something. And I said, you know, Diane, what you do is you, you know, you hire a private publicist and you set up a whole nother tour about this book. And she says to me now, Bob, you have to know when the public has spoken. And I sort of thought about that on Election Day this year.

I sort of had to understand that what the people want is what they want, and you can't necessarily force them or make them. Now, if that's a terrible, terrible bit of advice to a young person who's got a book and should do everything that he or she can to get it out there, set up every event, do everything you can, but to me, control and the the ease of just recognizing no matter what I do right now, is this an uplifting conversation? No, but. It does bring me to something

that I have been thinking about lately, which is the art and the joy of giving up. Like knowing when you can stop being the bird flying against the glass and give yourself a break. That's an intriguing, deep and profound statement because giving up and letting go are very different things that, to me, often get confused. Tell me more. I didn't. I don't know what you mean. When I think of giving up, I think of I'm done, I'm quitting, I'm never doing this again.

When I think of letting go, to me it's a rewrite of how I think using writing analogy. I'm saying to myself, I am going to do this for me. I know there are other critics. I'm going to make sure I'm finding joy in what I'm doing, that I'm having fun with it, that maybe it's a whole new topic that interests me. And I'm going to explore that without necessarily thinking of the end consequence.

Because sometimes when you start something, if you're just focusing on how much you're into it, the thing, it's like the pieces of the puzzle start to fall together. Like earlier we were talking and you said, you know, you, we were talking about singing and, and I want to get into this. You mentioned you had a brother who had a stroke that couldn't speak, but singing changed his life again. I think that's a very moving story. I want to know more. I know people who have had

strokes. I would love to figure out a way to get through to them. We have more people that are our age in this country right now than any other age, you know, are aging up. We're so and strokes are becoming more prevalent. And when you see someone have a stroke, it's it's debilitating. So I would think it's not giving up, it's letting go of the perceived notions that other people are going to have, letting go of the expectation because. Expectation it and.

We, you know, we do stuff and we have so many expectations of what are the response going to be, what's the result going to be and there that's a lot of misery often in that. OK, let's talk about that for a SEC. There was a book called On Giving Up that came out last year by the psychologist philosopher Adam Phillips, an Englishman, quite a popular author. It was a small book and it was rather academic for me, but at the time I was going through a lot of discomfort, changing what

my goals were. One of the things that stood out from the book On Giving Up was that he talked a little bit about on giving up bad things like cigarettes or booze or compulsive gambling, which was not something I was interested in. But he talked about that in context of giving up things that were just making you disappointing you or making you anxious or unhappy. And he thought that the public might think of that as not failing as much as transitioning.

And I like that idea. Now, the contrary of that would

be what the great writer Samuel Beckett said. And I think this might have been addressed also to writers, which is fail once, no bother, fail again, fail better. That's a good one. I love it. Can you? However, can you fail once? No bother, fail again, Fail better now? This is not where I'm at anymore. I'm not interested in failing at all anymore.

And that is probably privilege of being 67 and being comfortable enough financially that I don't have to get a job, you know, at Walmart. But my story about giving up

sort of does has to do with singing and my brother and my marriage. And the reason I've been thinking about it is all when COVID started, I had a particularly dramatic time. My brother who had had a stroke, my Big Brother, my successful, very paternal, fraternal, bossy Big Brother who loved me. I was his only brother. I had a stroke, and it took away his ability to speak. And while his wife and his son were pushing him in therapy and physical therapy, it just wasn't coming back.

It was not coming back. And I could see it and I knew it. And he was miserable. Being shuttled, you know, to this therapy and that and the speech and how frustrating after a year and it's not coming back, you know, for a man who still had complete control of his cognition, right? I mean, I could read to him from the New York Times and he, we'd laugh at stuff going on, you know, So he just sort of gave up eventually. And what I realized was even though he couldn't speak at all,

he could sing. And that was in our family. Since we were babies, we had a mother who sang to us. You know, we still remember the Yiddish lullaby she sang. Our father loved to harmonize. We would have, Passover stated.

We would sing through the whole thing. I did little shows in the living room. We sang in the car at the top of our lungs. We sang in the backyard. Music was this universal consciousness for us. And when my brother gave up on the speech and his wife and son, I think sort of backed off, I came in and we sang and he fortunately had a piano. I have a ukulele. It's all we did.

And you might think that somebody who had a massive stroke, who was a paraplegic in a wheelchair, but who still could think, would give up. But in his case, no, you know, he was right at home exactly where he was. But it was, I think taking the expectation, like you said, of getting speech back and getting back on his feet and getting out of a wheelchair and taking that away and giving up on it actually did give him a nice few years at the end. Do you think it's like arguing semantics?

If I say, is it giving up or is it accepting? Because I love the Serenity Prayer and whenever somebody's having trouble in anything, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous made a famous. But I just think it's such a good prayer for everybody. Accepting what you can't control, right? Yeah. You know, because when you accept something, new possibilities just to me seem to appear. Yeah. Yes, that's that's you know, 'cause. You stop pushing the boulder uphill. I can't push the boulder uphill.

You got it If I stop. So yeah, expand on that.

Well, I mean, I was going to say the boulder uphill situation is and you know, again, like this is the opposite of a self promotional video that I'm going to look like some hotshot author with a million balls in the air and this project or that. I mean, the truth is I started to think of all the plays I had written that that had runs off Broadway or in regional theaters, but they never got further.

And that's a boulder. And this musical that I wrote and this cabaret show that I wrote with a boulder right now, I just finished writing a one man show for the actor George Hamilton. And it was a fantastic process and he's got an amazing life. But I don't really think now that we're done with it, he's 85. I don't know that he's going to want to do a one man show. So talking him and said that's another boulder.

All these boulders I'm looking at now at the bottom of a Canyon and maybe flowers are starting to grow on them and birds are nesting on them. But there's like a whole so many things I wanted to do. You know, recently I was fooling around with a producer because I wanted to talk about, I wanted to do a cheeky, well, a podcast, but starting as an Instagram on pills. So I did this thing called pill talk, you know, and I was having such a good time with it.

But, you know, because I think people have shame around their pharmaceuticals and, you know, meds. Like if I did a podcast, it would be called Pill Talk and I would invite people on and I'd say, what meds are you on? And then our conversation would go like this. So anyway, that was another boulder. I mean, it's just like console is constantly doing projects,

right? With the goal, not creative satisfaction as much as taking my talents and my humor and trying to get something out in the world the way you've gotten this out in the world, for example. So anyway, all the boulders, pushing the boulders up the hill, The biggest boulder that I was pushing up a hill for many

years was my marriage. I was married to a fantastic guy, very literary, very funny, incredibly supportive, who really helped me like write, get my books, get myself together as an author, but had serious issues. And when it became clear that he wasn't loving me anymore and no matter what I did, it wasn't going to change, of course, I suffered because like at the age of 60, you know, one I didn't, I didn't want to be single again. I didn't want that.

I didn't like the idea of giving up our shared country house, the dog that we shared. There was so much I didn't want to give up and I held on to it. But all signs were indicating that, you know, he'd lost that love and feeling, you know, you know, and when finally push came to shove and something kind of threatening was happening, that made me move out. And this was like, I think the day after COVID was declared in New York State. You know, I'm a lucky guy.

I have people who like me. And so I had a couch to stay on on Long Island in this town where I spent a lot of time. And then another, somebody else gave me their house and and then I found a really nice place to live. And as the weeks went on, I realized that giving up on this was bringing out all the love and all the good feelings I had accumulated through friendship and good relationships, right? And I thought, oh, my God, I'm not a terrible person.

A lot of people enjoy what I have to offer. And I had to release myself and give up on marriage. Now, that's a very common story. I think in my particular case, I moved into this little cottage in the dark of, like, you know, March. It was very quiet area. It was very cold that that year 2020, but there was a little

instead of a kitchen table, there was a bar in this little cottage where you would eat stools and a bar. And I looked at it and I thought, piano, I want a piano in this dark little cottage in the middle of the winter. I want to bring back into my life what gave me such joy as a child and as a little boy, playing the piano for my parents and doing shows with my girl cousins in the living room for holidays and singing and learning new songs.

And I remember looking and looking to find a piano small enough that wasn't going to be a disaster when I went to Connecticut to buy it, you know, and find out it was a waste of money, time. And I was walking up our country lane and this young friend of mine is biking pass and he stops and he goes, hey, Bob, do you need a piano? Because I thought of you. And I know that you wanted one in the house you lived in with your husband, but I knew there

wasn't room. I have it in storage in Patchogue. Come take a look. And it's and it was small and of all things, this piano fit under my bar instantly. And almost the moment that happened, we figured out how to sing with all the I very talented neighbors. And they were all of course, had nothing to do. And we had porches and heat lamps and we'd sing songs. Sometimes I would, oh, and I would zoom on the piano with my brother, who was in a nursing

home, and we would sing. I mean, I have recordings of him singing You Are My Sunshine with me. And I formed a band, something I always wanted to do my whole life, but I knew I was never good enough to really do that, especially in a city like New York. Well, we did it, you know, he rehearsed. I, I don't know if we opened all the window. I mean, singing is a very dangerous thing to do during COVID. It's a, it's a super spreader, but we did it. Nobody got sick.

And because I had given up on this marriage where first of all, I couldn't even have a piano in that little the house I lived in with my husband. But B, the time, the need to express the love that maybe can go into a relationship was going into this relationship with music and people that wanted to

sing. And so within a year, one of my dreams, you know, just to be able to choose the songs for a band to sing and write the harmonies and rehearse enough and then have a very, very receptive audience happened, and it's still happening now, more recently, you know, this topic

of singing, which interested me tremendously because of my brother's story and how we sang right to the end, I mean. Which is just remarkable. Is there a medical like research that's singing and overcome? Lots of things. Oh, but you can't speak, but you could sing. Yeah. I mean, that's just. Remarkable. You have a science background, I'll tell you. I'll tell you about it a little

bit. And I don't think it's news, but some interesting things about how people whose left side are affected, which effects language and I think other area areas too. But when you sing. You. Are rhythmically throwing yourself into something that overrides the issue of words, like a single word and its meaning. So that's one thing that happens, another thing that happens and. Are there any books on that? Yeah, there are, there's, there's, there's work out there.

I was not, I was not on to anything new in thinking about wanting to write about why we sing. Another thing that happens, of course, as you've read, is that Alzheimer's patients and dementia people, what singing does for them is it triggers memory because they associate this song, what a wonderful world with a time when they may have been in college or something.

And, and so it, it releases a different, it releases them from the concerns of the present and it throws them back in the past, which is very helpful, you know, for people. And then of course, with their kids who are all freaked out because their parents have lost their mind across the board. If they sing to them, it will bring them into the present. I thought that with my brother, singing brought him into the

moment, into the present. And not only that, but in his case, the guy was such an opinionated, powerful man when he was well. And I think that this let let us know he wanted us to know he was still there. And that's how he did it. And that's how we did it. And there was nothing else that he got a kick out of as much as

that. I mean, he had, you know, we bag on pots and pans and, you know, and then and then the other thing about it is that it made me and this was the case with my dad in my second book when he was unwell and he really needed a lot of entertainment. And it was the perfect job for me, for both my brother and my dad is to be the entertainment, to be the transgressive, funny, play songs by ear, sit at the piano at the assisted living place and, you know, make a fool

of myself. Oh, there people were looking on and my dad was singing at the top of his lungs. And so and So what I, what I always advise when you're in a situation that is overpowering and, and and frustrating with a loved one who's unwell and is probably not going to get better, is to figure out how the best time you can in their presence because that will pay off.

So for instance, when my ex who loves social media was going through this with his 95 year old mom, I suggested that he like bring his iPad and introduce her to the world of Facebook and Facebook messaging and get her granddaughters who she loved onto the iPad on Facebook and talk. And like, you know, it was like all of a sudden she was thrown into the world of the future, you know, that she didn't know.

And he loved it because he was sort of being the DJ and he was, you know, and I loved seeing that and he was very grateful for that. And and I think talking about all of these things, taking care of people who really need you and figuring out a way to find your muse again without expectation does come when you get to the point where you give up. And it's not so sad. I have so many friends that say, oh, Bob, you're such a talented writer. You know, you shouldn't give up.

And, you know, you need to do another book and all. Well, you know, I tried to do a book on singing. I have a very good agent and he couldn't sell it to a publisher. The numbers on my books weren't so good, right. And I realized, you know, I'm, I probably will go back and figure out how it will work. But if you don't sell a lot of memoir, you're probably not a publisher's not going to jump. If your, your sales figures aren't good, they're not going

to jump to another one. And so I have to figure that out, you know, or I can do what I've been doing, which is just have the best time in the world doing something new, which in my case is working on another musical show to perform on Long Island. And I'm in a songwriting class with a bunch of very talented songwriters in West Hampton. And, you know, other people find their way into painting or

poetry groups. And I know this probably, you know, young people would roll their eyes and be disappointed in me because a lot of young, younger writers and editors look up to me, you know, because when they were very little, I was in the New York Times every week. And, you know, I had a big presence in the the style section of the Times, and I had a personal voice. And somehow I broke through and

had an audience. And so people are disappointed that I'm fooling around writing songs that they're never going to hear, you know, But I think that. How do you know they're never going to hear them? Now don't you lay your expectations on me, Diane. No, no expectations. Just a just a question, you know. How do you know? How do I know? Because I'm not going. That's not what I want to do with them.

All I want to do is sing them to my songwriting group and play them at my next gig in two weeks in an Italian restaurant with my little band. That's you know. I think that's how Billy Joel started. And look at what happened, you know, just wasn't he sitting in an Italian little Italian restaurant with a bottle of red and a bottle of white and, or actually in Cold Spring Harbor in a bar which my older brothers and sisters remember and, you know. He was probably all 20 years

old. I, I, you have to respect the release and of the experience of letting go. You know, I think that the trick is to stay engaged. And so that's really, I think what I might be talking about, about taking up singing and engaging my brother in, in singing. And the trick is to stay engaged, which is. Probably why I push back on the word of letting go, you know, because I don't think it's letting go. I think it's accepting. I think it's acknowledging. I think it's again, it could be

semantics. You know, you write books, you I'm sure you debate a word, one word versus another and how is it going to be interpreted? But you're shifting into new things. You're making room. You're you're making room for new possibilities. Yes, yeah. Now we happen to be sitting in

the middle of the most ambitious city in the world. Certainly in London. People are ashamed of being ambitious. You know, they the last thing they respect is somebody self promoting and you know, same thing in Paris. They have a different way about accruing power. And here my discomfort in this transitioning in New York is that it really is a city that's all about what you're working on. I will go out tonight and people will say, what are you working on? And, you know, 10 years ago, I

would have said, well, I'm work. I'm thinking about the topic of,

of singing. I want to write a book about why we sing across cultures and emotionally and why, why it means so much, you know, and I would talk about that and I'd say, you know, and I'm publishing this piece in the Times and, you know, being flown off to Europe, you know, I mean, they that is what is social currency in my world in New York, what you're working on now, you know, I'm sure there are people who are working in other areas like that.

People don't want to hear about when you, but when you have a byline and a slightly public following, then people want to know that you're doing something like that right now. Can you imagine if I said, well, I just finished a song I really like about my dog? If I go to my event tonight at Joe's Pub, you know and well, I. Don't know I'm. I'm old enough to remember a song. Me and you and a dog named Blue. Oh yeah, so or Boo, whatever the dog's. Name Bojangles on a dog.

You know they're no, but you know what I mean. It's just like it doesn't, it's a it's a transition of what people can expect. You know, you were, you were looking at my maybe looking at my bio or reading about me a little bit, you know, saying, oh, it must be uncomfortable, like leaving a very glamorous nightlife, you know, and having a decent ethical compass, right, to be moral, but also be socially ambitious or whatever it was that you very wisely

discerned. Well, I'm not so socially ambitious anymore because I'm not invited, right. And so I can be, I can admit that, Oh, it would be nice to be invited to that black tie dinner.

You know, I'd be really nice. Right now, I'm obsessing about trying to get a preview of the new Frick, which just the Frick Museum just got renovated, you know, or the opening night of, you know, the next big musical, which is what I used to do, not because I was so special, but because I had a column in The New York Times, right. So, you know, people are very

transactional in this town. Now. The expectations of having that kind of life are, let's put it this way, I'm better suited to be a bigger fish in this little town on Long Island called Brookhaven then. I mean, I would never ever play the songs that I play with my band in the city, right? So you have to adjust like you say. And there's fun in that. You know, it's, but it's also, you know, admitting I'm not what I had hoped I would be right now.

And believe me, when you live in New York and you grew up around David Sedaris and Candace Bushnell and a friend of mine who has another musical opening on Broadway and another friend who just is doing a documentary for HBO, you know, it's it's a particularly accomplished group. And all my friends are accomplished. They write best selling books, you know, and we all enjoy each other and I'm proud to know them. But I'm not accomplished that way. Did I do something with my life?

Sure. You know, I made my parents very proud. You know, my small town librarian mom and my small town lawyer dad. You know the their sons who accomplished things in business and in my case, a small media career, publishing career. You know they were proud. But no, on the big picture, I'm not famous. I'm not that rich. I'm not rich. And you know, I don't have another book to pitch to you. Yeah, and that's where we are. And that's what you want to always say is yet.

Well, I believe in acceptance and if you accept where you are now without any expectations, I believe possibilities unfold. If if I'm when I'm in a state of constant acceptance and I mean, or constant challenging myself, possibilities might be less likely. But the more I get into the mode of, well, this is this is where I'm at today. And all I have to do is wake up and you know, interview Bob and I have no idea what's happening next because that's pretty much

how life is unfolded. I have no clue. And I think I have a clue. I think I can control, I think I can decide what's going to happen next. And that's been proven false more times than it's been proven true. So you're saying just I think I I think I agree with this. Like you get up with something to do. My bad days are when I don't and I waste time. That's quitting.

Zoom scrolling or, you know, not that I dislike napping or that I, I think it's valuable, but, you know, the better days are when I do something as little as finishing a song or figuring out the chords to a song, because you never know. Or pitching. You know, I pitched my New Yorker editor the other day and immediately got rejected. But I did it, you know. That's all that counts. Right and. Because that thought is now out in the universe, and you have no idea when that editor may say 1.

Excuse me. It was great talking to Bob the other day. I got another idea for him. Yeah, or two. I didn't think that was a great idea then, but now that I've had a cup of coffee, you know, or now that I'm in a. Better. I think it's worse. Well, yeah, well, it could be.

I don't want this to end, but we are up with our time. What do you like? That here I I have acceptance for the fact that we're out of. Time and I'm bummed we're going to have to talk about this again. Your wisdom, What were you going to ask? I said we're just going to have to do this again because I like your insight. Yeah, I'll come back when my next book is out, Diane. I don't know. Maybe it's going to be your next song. Maybe it's going to be that play with George Hamilton.

Yeah, I don't know, George. A lot of possibility. That's. Right, George? Well, thank you. This has been really great. Yep. I'm inspired. That's what it's about, right? Yeah. Thank you and you inspired me. I'm Diane Grissel. This has been the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics podcast. My guest has been Bob Morris, the Bob Morris if you want to look up his website and there's going to be all kinds of links so you can find him his books.

I highly recommend you check out any of his articles as well as books because they are great. They're very thought provoking and that's what this is all about. So thank you, Bob. I really appreciate your time. A. Pleasure. Thank you, everybody. Again, we've been recording at Manhattan Center and I'm going to encourage you all to subscribe and share this with your friends. Thanks a lot. Have a great day week, see you next time.